Shelley Crouch

Shelley Crouch is an artist and writer from east-central Illinois. Her most recent book, Let's Learn About Mammals, the fourth book in her series Exploring Nature Through Art, was released on October 1, 2026. It is a nonfiction children's book that combines an art book with a nature book and is available in paperback. Her first solo book in the series, Let's Learn About Bugs, was released in late fall 2023; her second, Let's Learn About Birds, in September 2024; and her third, Let's Learn About Reptiles and Amphibians, was released in November 2025.

Shelley Crouch also contributed to Past-Forward's Memoir Writers' collaborative memoir collection, For the Record, published by CHI in November 2021, and CHI Authors' collaborative COVID memoir, The Chaos of COVID, in November 2022.

She is working on a collection of her and her late mother's memoirs, tentatively titled Like Mother, Like Daughter: Memories Across the Generations, which she hopes to release in 2027.

She has written and illustrated four nonfiction board books for toddlers: Pond Life (2020), My Bug Book (2020), Texas Wildlife (2020), and My Bird Book (2021). These books, filled with simple watercolors and text, are available through the Illinois Heartland Library System's interlibrary loan program.

To keep things interesting, she is branching into fiction. She is working on a middle-grade mystery titled Only the Dog Knows, illustrated with simple pen-and-ink drawings; a young-adult historical novel, Esther and Bonnie; and an illustrated storybook for preschoolers, Emily's Moon. She plans to publish all these works in 2027-29.